9 out of 10 monkeys believe they are not behind glass

I am running Windows 7 Enterprise x64, and I just deployed my first vSphere box into my production environment. I have a smattering of 3.5 boxes out there, and the previous client works just fine on Windows 7.

Not the vSphere 4 client. Piece of crap. Throws up errors on login:

Error Parsing the server “host ip” “clients.xml” file. Login will continue contact your system administrator.

The irony there is that I am the system administrator. Click ok… then:

The type initializer for “VirtualInfrastrcture.Utils.HttpWebRequestProxy” threw an exception.

Thankfully a quick Bing/Google search popped the answer from the VMware communities… it is all because of a single dll in .net framework that the client relies on.

Browse to the install directory of the client: C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\ and create a folder called “Lib”.

Obtain a system.dll file from a .net Framework 3.5sp1 install on a XP/2003 machine (found in %SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\system.dll).

Copy the system.dll to the folder you created: C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\Lib\system.dll

Then open the client app vpxclient.exe.config file and add a element with a development mode set to true within the bounds of the element (be sure to enclose each line in <>).

configuration
...
runtime
developmentMode developerInstallation="true"/
/runtime
/configuration

Then create a batch file to start up the app… like vpxclient.bat and put these lines in:
SET DEVPATH=C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\Lib
"C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\VpxClient.exe"
exit


Start the client with the batch file… works like a champ.